Designing for the Eye: Optical corrections in architecture and typography

I would argue that the Windows 95-2000 era SOTA application design, where Windows and Office arguably truly established themselves (and became highly customizable), was less brutalist than the preceding Windows 3.x design. Incidentally, the Steve Jobs quote is from an interview in 1995, so preceding that era.

Borland's DOS IDEs represented what we might call brutalism in interface design. Windows (after 2000) arbitrarily became more like favelas with dozens of unnecessary panels in every application, a great example of when features win over rationality.

I just realized that I'm not sure if it's Borland or Norton who brought the blue interface to DOS first. Does someone remember who was first?

For some whom miss this deep blue and cyan. https://play.tirreno.com/game

The Ribbon was an enormous backwards step.

If it is ugly, it doesn’t work. One you understand that – really understand that deeply – you will not go back to the frame of mind you have now.

Any link? Sounds interesting!

That is a very good catch, I learned something, thank you!

Incidentally, I also wrote a piece about AI and more or less that point: www.nubero.ch/blog/014/

The huge screens and insanely high resolution HD ends up looking hyperreal. Not sure if anyone else has noticed the same, but its mildly uncomfortable and makes me want to watch less. Its sort of exhausting and overstimulatimg

I have to wonder to what extent the strangeness is just unfamiliarity.

The problem is that there are two things going on.

1. “HDR” is often referring to a tone mapping to convert the 10-14 bits of dynamic range in a camera’s raw file into the 8bits that fit into a jpeg (and often the screen).

2. HDR also refers to actually showing more than those 8bits of information. Saving more than 8bits in the image and having a screen that can show more than 8 bits of color.

#1 is real easy to make look unnatural, and most phones go over the top with it. #2 is a straightforward improvement and basically always makes the photo better.

You made a good catch with the spacing of the columns! I actually wrote about it in the article in the 7th footnote. But that is where it had to remain because – as I assume you know from how you write – it’s a rabbit hole. We could go further and mention that behind the inner columns is actually the cella (inner chamber), which would make for a darker backdrop of these columns than the outermost columns, which would be set against the blue sky, would have. That too makes for a difference in perception and is a further reason, why the outermost columns are set more closely to their cella-backed neighbour columns… And so on, and so on… :-)

The Taj Mahal is 372 years old, the Parthenon 2457. And the latter isn’t even the first Doric temple.

My humble guess is because typography is really just a (mostly non-political/religious) form of psychological and philosophical debates.

Look at the discussion surrounding the typography on Pope Francis' tombstone to see how the typography conversation/debate easily transcended the religious background it originated from, which seems atypical to me.

I don’t know why but nerds love typography. I sure do :)

Maybe something about the fact that it’s familiar for people working with computers. It’s approachable (needs a keyboard and some fonts), familiar (we spend our time typing and reading), well defined (it’s a succession of a finite number of shapes that are also well defined, not as Freeform as a drawing).

It’s an interesting middle ground between technology, psychology and art. As I said in the article when I compared the skill set with that of the architect. Personally, I find that one of the most interesting aspects is the “usability” of typefaces. What is usually called legibility. But if you think about it, it’s really the usability of a typeface. I wrote about that too (and will again): www.nubero.ch/blog/011/

As a mathematician who enjoys tech news, my interest in typography comes directly through Knuth and his work creating TeX.

Thanks for your nice comment! It’s good to hear that people get something out of it! If you want to help, please share the link to the article around your colleagues and friends. Thanks again!

The constraints for writing with a quill on expensive parchment were the same in Northern Europe and in Southern Europe.

Despite that, during the "Gothic" time, the Gothic writing style preferred in Northern Europe (Textura quadrata, or Textura sine pedibus for the most expensive manuscripts) was clearly different from the Gothic writing style preferred in Southern Europe (Rotunda), the Northern one replacing all curved lines with broken segmented lines and having taller and narrower letters, while the Southern one preserved some of the curved lines and had wider less tall letters.

The same style differences could be seen in the architecture of expensive buildings, like churches, so there is little doubt that it was a difference in taste, not a difference caused by material constraints. The material constraints only caused both styles to use condensed bold letters, together with a lot of abbreviations.

I’m sorry but what you write is simply not correct. Gothic writing is actually a form of calligraphy and the very stilted shape that the characters have make it actually very hard/cumbersome/slow to write. Textura is one of the styles and it is called that because the whole page was supposed to look evenly “gray” when it was filled with writing. For fast writing, people always developed a sort of cursive because that letter shape seems to almost automatically appear once the human hand uses a pen-like instrument with our (Latin/Greek/Western) writing and is writing fast. The Romans had a cursive for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) and many others after them did too. This was also used for quick messaging of news/instructions as opposed to monks copying books for months on end.

As for what you said about the sagging and the pillars falling out, that’s also incorrect. In the article, I mentioned the classical orders, which are Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. Only Doric temples used the curvature of the stylobate and the inclination of the pillars throughout. In the other two styles, this was very rare, if it happened at all. The two largest temples of the other two styles didn’t have it for example: The temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens is a Corinthian style temple which has a flat stylobate and no inclination of the columns. The same goes for the Artemision (Temple of Artemis) in Ephesus. There are countless other examples. The entasis is (mostly) the only thing that was transplanted from the doric style to the other two.

Except the Alto looked and worked nothing like the Lisa OS nor the Mac OS.

Its like saying Xerox just lifted it all from the Mother of All Demos.

That’s not quite true. If you look at what Bill Atkinson did with the innovations on the first Macintosh, comparing it to Xerox Alto won’t hold up. Of course they got a first general idea that an interface to a computer could be more than just a command line interface, but the Macintosh is to the Alto what a modern machine gun ist to throwing stones. The principle is the same in the sense that you somehow get a projectile to travel the distance to your enemy beyond your reach to hit him, but that’s about all there is in similarities. On the Alto, the windows couldn’t even overlap… Not to smaller what the people at Xerox Parc did, but the Macintosh Team and specifically Atkinson went way beyond anything that existed before.